Business-relevant data, such as for example data retained and used by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other business software applications, can be represented as collections of entities that are characterized by intra- and inter-collection links. The entities can be data objects, such as for example business objects, and can include collections of data object nodes (for example, business object nodes). Associations between the nodes in a same collection or data object can be referred to intra-collection associations or links, and associations between nodes in different collections or objects can be referred to as inter-collection associations or links.
Some business programming languages, such as for example the Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) language, lack native support for data associations between nodes of different data objects (e.g., business objects). Instead, application developers have historically implemented various frameworks on top of the language layer to simulate support for these associations. Such frameworks inherently introduce a higher level of complexity and generate overhead which leads to performance decrease of the productive system. Frameworks are generally incapable of achieving the same reduction of development effort and maintenance costs as native support for such features could provide.